So, let’s dig into those issues — and how your business can begin to tackle them.

What Is Business Travel Management?

Business travel management is managing employee travel — from arrangements in advance of a trip until the employee returns home and is reimbursed for any out-of-pocket work expenses. It includes the entire process of booking flights or other travel arrangements, hotels, cabs or rideshare services, employee meals and other incidentals, as well as approvals, expense tracking and reporting procedures, and the implementation and enforcement of a corporate travel policy.

Critically, businesses must ensure that expenses stay in line with the expense policies in place so that spending doesn’t get out of control. As such, there must be a process in place to make payments, track them, and, if necessary, reimburse employees for expenses they incurred while traveling.

The biggest travel management facing businesses can be broken down into three categories:

• The Employee Experience
• Managing Services and Providers
• Staying in Control

Let’s look at the challenges involved in each category: 

The Employee Experience

Letting employees book their own travel

Most employees are used to booking personal travel, and want to be able to choose business travel options on their own. But giving employees free reign to book business trips makes it difficult for travel and finance managers to get visibility and ensure that the travel and expense policies are being followed.

Ensuring employee safety

As with any sort of trip, employees can be exposed to certain risks when traveling for business. Employers have a duty of care, meaning they must take appropriate measures to ensure employee safety. For instance if an employee is injured in a car accident while traveling it’s important for the business to ensure they have access to proper medical care and other services. 

Reimbursement and expense reporting challenges

Many companies still require employees to pay for expenses upfront while traveling, then reimburse them afterwards. This can lead to hassles for employees such as having to keep track of multiple paper receipts or being stuck with out of pocket expenses while waiting for reimbursement. This is not only annoying for employees, but it also adds an additional layer of work to finance teams who then need to track, account for, and reconcile the expenses.

Travel policy compliance

Enforcing travel and expense policies is key to making sure that rules and budgets are followed. However, once employees are on the road with a traditional company card, it’s difficult to keep track of everything they’re spending — and if they spend out of policy, it often isn’t noticed until the transaction has already happened.

Managing Services and Providers

Managing multiple travel providers

Every business has different needs and preferences. And while there are benefits to using  different providers, online and offline booking, travel management companies (TMCs), and various travel agencies, managing too many systems makes everyone’s job more difficult. To avoid hassle, many travel solutions impose a single provider — but this limits their ability to get the best deals and have access to the most options.

Beyond just flights

Many travel solutions available focus on booking flights or other single elements of business travel. However, booking a flight for an employee is pretty useless if they don’t have a hotel to stay in, food to eat, and ways to get around once they’re at their destination. Finding a comprehensive solution that brings all the pieces of the business travel puzzle together in one system can be a game-changer.

Dealing with global providers

When employees travel internationally, they can incur expenses in multiple currencies. This can be a nightmare for finance teams — from making sure that payments will even be accepted to dealing with foreign exchange rates when it comes time to reconcile and reimburse the employee. 

Staying in Control

Approval workflows

The process of approving travel requests is time-consuming and resource-intensive if someone has to manually review requests to check for policy compliance.. This bottleneck is not only a burden on the manager responsible for approving requests, but also creates unnecessarily long wait times for employees.

Ensuring compliance

A corporate travel policy is only useful if travel managers enforce it and employees follow it. It’s crucial for employees to understand the policy, so make it easy-to-understand and readily available. Keep it up-to-date and notify employees of any changes as they happen.

Managing Multiple Entities

If you have multiple entities in different countries, you probably want (or already have) different policies for each one. While there may be some overlap, there are also important differences. For example, in some countries employees are legally entitled to reimbursement for certain expenses incurred during business travels. 

Reconciling expenses at month end

Reconciling the books becomes tricky once you have employees incurring expenses in foreign currencies for business travel. If they’re unable to use cards for payments in local currency, the finance team will need to deal with fluctuating foreign exchange rates when closing the books. Same goes for if a corporate card doesn’t work in a foreign country and an employee needs to pay out of pocket then get reimbursed.

Categories of Solutions

Let’s take a look at some of the types of solutions available on the market to help make travel management less of a pain in the you-know-what.

Travel Management Software

These software platforms allow organizations to manage all aspects of travel, from policy management to booking and expense reporting. Typically it includes an offline booking tool, and is often also used by a corporate travel agent as the primary communication channel to travelers. 

Travel Management Company (TMC)

A TMC is a kind of travel agency, or service provider that helps businesses manage their business travel needs. The services they provide go beyond a simple booking platform and instead focus on providing a tailored service with professionals available to walk employees through the entire process of arranging their trip.

Travel and Expense Management Platforms

These platforms provide companies with the means to pay for travel, and other categories of expenses, as well as reimbursing employees for payments they make while traveling. However, these solutions don’t typically provide a solution for booking travel — or if they do, they curtail the options available to businesses.

Tackling Challenges

Awareness is the first step to facing these challenges, but there are some general strategies travel managers and finance teams can pursue to really overcome common obstacles.

Flexibility

It’s important for both travel managers and employees to have access to flexible solutions that allow them to work with multiple providers. Being locked into a single TMC, for example, puts limits on travel options and can prevent businesses from getting the best prices on flights, transportation and accommodations.

Embed Policy at Point of Payment

The easiest way to avoid out-of-policy purchases is to prevent them. Look for a solution that provides virtual cards that can be customized to enforce limits, vendors or time frames for business trips. This way, finance and travel managers can track how the money is being spent, while the employee has the freedom to select their travel preferences.

Think Globally

Global enterprise needs global solutions. If your travel solution isn’t ready to work with multiple currencies and multiple business entities, it will limit your team’s ability to do business around the world.

Automate Automate Automate

Managing  business travel, from flight bookings to reimbursements, has traditionally demanded significant time and manual effort. Automation elements like approvals and policy compliance  eliminates tedious tasks and ensures that employees are staying on budget.

Provide a Complete Solution

The easiest way to tackle travel management challenges is with an all-in-one system — or one that integrates all systems. Look for a comprehensive solution that  can help you from beginning to end — from planning to booking to payment to reconciliation. This makes it easy for the whole team, from travel managers down to end users.

Summary

With business travel booming again, global organizations need to be ready to meet new challenges by knowing what solutions and strategies are available.

Remember that managing employee travel requires:

• Providing a seamless experience for employees
• Evaluating and managing multiple solutions and providers
• Staying in control of expenses and maintaining policy compliance.

To tackle these challenges look for platforms that provide complete solutions across the board, that help you automate key tasks, are equipped to help global enterprises, and that give you the flexibility to choose the providers that are right for you.

Learn more about how Mesh can help your organization make travel and expense management simple and seamless.

The post How to Navigate the Biggest Challenges in Business Travel Management appeared first on Mesh.

In 2023, we announced a number of new products and features that will set Mesh Payments up for the future of global business. We are focusing more intently on providing the solutions needed by global enterprises in general and by our customers more specifically. In 2023, we took steps that make Mesh the best solution for global, multi-entity business and with our sharper focus on travel, aim to help enterprises solve one of the biggest pain points they face today.

Major Mesh product launches in 2023

Mesh had a super busy and exciting spring and summer, unveiling three major new products.

Mesh Travel Management

Mesh unveiled our travel initiative that will take the company in exciting new directions. Mesh Travel brings our focus on flexibility and providing seamless experiences to the world of business travel.

Mesh Travel is the industry’s only TMC-agnostic travel management solution integrated with corporate cards, automated travel policy enforcement, and AI-enabled expense management tools. It gives businesses the tools they need to book travel, pay for it, and manage the entire process from a single platform that’s integrated with their other payments and expenses.

Importantly, Mesh Travel was built with global enterprises in mind and gives them important tools, such as Duty-of-care and support for multiple entities and currencies, that they need to manage travel across worldwide remote workforces.

Find out more about Mesh Travel Management.

Mesh Global

Mesh also announced Mesh Global, a unified platform for global enterprises to manage all of their worldwide spend. It helps businesses manage each local entity with fine level controls customized for local regulations and compliance as well as allowing them to hold balances and fund payments and reimbursements in local currencies.

Marking the launch, Mesh CEO Oded Zehavi said, “Managing spend for remote workforces and global operations can be complex, but Mesh offers a unified platform for global enterprises to handle local operations in local currency at scale. Mesh Payments is thrilled to help businesses increase their finance efficiency and solve the pain points of global spend.”

Find out more about Mesh Global.

Mesh ProcurePay

Additionally, Mesh launched ProcurePay, a flexible solution that connects to any ERP or procurement system, creating a seamless, automated workflow from PO to payment.

Procurement has been a difficult challenge for businesses, requiring them to manage several disconnected platforms. ProcurePay helps automate the process by connecting to the business’s ERP or procurement system. When a PO is approved, it triggers Mesh to automatically create a virtual card. Cards are pre-coded with all the necessary data from the PO, and embedded spend policies. ProcurePay even allows for additional, customizable approvals to ensure everyone is on the same page for large purchases.

Find out more about ProcurePay.

Helping customers manage spend

When we look at the progress we made over 2023, we’re proud of the way we’ve helped companies save time and money, and gain control over their spending and increasing visibility into expenses. Here’s an overview of how we helped our customers.

A year of recognition

In 2023, Mesh was recognized multiple times as a rapidly growing company that is helping to solve new problems and serve new market categories:

• Mesh Picked by G2 as One of its 100 Fastest Growing Products
• Mesh Named to CB Insights’ Fintech 100 List
• Mesh Selected as SmartBrief Top Innovators in Business Travel

Resources for finance and travel teams

Over the course of 2023 we’ve worked hard to build a library of valuable content that can help finance teams develop strategies to face the challenges of spend management in a global business landscape.

Some highlights from the past year:

• Employees and Expenses: Companies struggle to modernize expense management
• How to Create a Corporate Expense Policy Employees Will Actually Follow
• What To Ask When Evaluating Global Expense Management Solutions

In 2023 we also released the Mesh Podcast – CFO Trends, hosted by finance influencer Chris Ortega. We spoke to leaders in the finance space to look at the trends and developments that are shaping the future of the CFO office.

We look forward to our continued growth over 2024 and riding our momentum from the past year. All of our efforts are driven by our commitment to serving our customers and helping them face the unique challenges of global enterprises.

To find out more about Mesh Payments and how it can help your team take control of spending and manage travel across the globe, sign up for a demo today.

The post A Year of Growing Globally – 2023 in Review appeared first on Mesh.

Yet, many businesses still struggle with the procurement payment process. That’s why Mesh is rolling out a better way to manage procurement payments: Mesh ProcurePay.

The better way to (procure-to) pay

Mesh ProcurePay connects to any ERP or procurement system, creating a seamless, automated workflow from PO to payment.

But it’s not just about automating workflows. ProcurePay is the only procurement payment solution that lets buyers make in-person payments and ensures spend policy and PO compliance across any purchase order, including blanket POs (sometimes known as ‘general POs’).

Once connected to the ERP or procurement system, any approved purchase order will trigger Mesh to automatically create a virtual card. Cards are pre-coded with all the necessary data from the PO, and embedded spend policies. ProcurePay even allows for additional, customizable approvals to ensure everyone is on the same page for large purchases.

Mesh ProcurePay incorporates procurement payments into one centralized payment platform, dramatically improving payment flexibility and business outcomes for both procurement and finance teams.

System-agnostic

The most flexible procurement payment solution available, ProcurePay seamlessly connects to any ERP or procurement system. That gives finance and procurement teams the flexibility to work with the tools, platforms and processes that are best for their business today, and the freedom to change them tomorrow.

Automatic Card Creation & Assignment

Once a purchase order is approved, a virtual card is automatically assigned to the relevant employee – the requester or buyer – eliminating the need to manually update them or take other steps to involve them in the process.

In-Person Payments

In addition to online payments, with ProcurePay buyers can easily link their virtual card to a physical Mesh Plug & Pay card so they can make purchases at brick & mortar stores while still complying with all required spend policies.

Spending Policy Enforcement

Controls are automatically embedded into each payment card to ensure that they are in-line with company spending policies. This makes it easy for finance teams to maintain control over spending while accelerating purchases.

Pre-Coded Cards

Payment cards are pre-coded with the relevant PO number and other important details to accelerate and simplify month-end reconciliation. This removes considerable amounts of manual labor, providing significant time savings.

Local Currency Payments

With support for multi-currency funding, ProcurePay allows companies to avoid expensive FX fees. Plus, Mesh cards can be used in over 140 countries and more than 200 currencies making it easy to manage procurement payments around the world.

Unified View Across All Spend

Unifying procurement spend with other spend categories (like T&E), gives finance and procurement managers full control and complete visibility across their spend.

Let Your Payments Pay You

Aggregating the whole spend allows managers to negotiate the best volume incentives, saving their companies money.

Simplified Reporting & Reconciliation

Mesh uses OCR to match a receipt to the right transaction, which is automatically pre-coded with the right PO number for easy end-of-month reconciliation.

Imagine having the flexibility to work with the best tools, platforms, and processes for your business today, while also having the freedom to switch them up tomorrow. Delivering this level of adaptability, crucial for staying ahead in a constantly evolving business landscape and controlling cash flow, is the driving force behind the launch of ProcurePay and our relentless focus on product capabilities here at Mesh.

To find out more about ProcurePay, sign up for a demo and see how Mesh Payments can streamline your procurement process.

The post Introducing Mesh ProcurePay appeared first on Mesh.

In this environment, it’s important for businesses and especially finance teams to be able to manage cash flow in multiple currencies for all the markets and countries where they operate

Many businesses have entities abroad, which require compliance with local regulations and tax laws. At any rate, tracking and recording the cash flow to and from multiple countries in multiple currencies presents a specific set of reporting requirements for your team.

Challenges

Managing foreign currency cash flow brings a number of challenges and there are several common mistakes that companies make when dealing with the process.

First and foremost is the challenge of consolidation during the monthly close. Finance teams will need to consolidate spending and other expenses made in multiple currencies across the business and convert to its functional currency in its home market. Modern accounting platforms have helped to automate this process but there are still manual tasks that demand time and effort and some businesses are still doing this process manually.

Inflation is also a confounding factor if a foreign subsidiary is operating in a country in a highly inflationary environment. We’re seeing the ramifications of this in the current environment with a number of countries currently experiencing periods of rapid inflation, and if finance teams aren’t careful this can lead to exchange loss.

An additional challenge is properly modeling cash flow from across multiple entities. This is compounded if those entities are using different ERPs or other platforms, spreading the data across multiple formats.

It’s a demanding process, but the right mindset can help finance teams deal with the process. So, with those challenges in mind, we collected four best practices to help your finance team manage multi-currency cash flow.

Build a FX Strategy

First and foremost, it’s important to build a foreign exchange (FX) strategy that accounts for all of the needs of your business and its specific requirements. It can start with a number of questions as you look at your company’s basic financial health, and then factor in the challenges and risks that are specific to managing foreign currency. It’s also critical to make sure you have clear visibility into your expenses and spending across global subsidiaries.

It’s also important to study the impact that FX fluctuations will have on your P&L and to prepare your business accordingly. Into 2024, this is likely to remain a top priority with the volatile FX and inflationary environment in many places around the world. So be prepared to build a hedging strategy depending on the markets you’re operating in and the volatility of their currency.

Your strategy needs to find a balance and help optimize your finance team’s efforts, making sure that foreign currency inflows and outflows are accurately recorded, and are in compliance with the disparate regulations you may face.

Develop a Robust Foreign Currency Cash Forecast

Forecasting cash flow is critical for any finance team. Foreign currency cash forecasts bring several new challenges and wrinkles as currencies fluctuate, compounding the challenge of building an accurate forecast.

First, it’s important to determine whether you will pursue a direct or indirect method of measuring your cash flow. A direct method, with a description of where the cash was spent, or an indirect method, where you start with your net loss/net profit and then make adjustments per period.

It’s recommended to choose the direct method as this will provide you with greater visibility and control over cash management. It may be more difficult and present additional challenges, but it can also provide greater visibility into spending and expenses. Understanding where money is being spent, both geographically speaking and on which products and services your business is paying for, can provide the relevant foundation for a more accurate forecast.

Automate Whenever Possible

Finance automation is becoming increasingly important as new online platforms emerge to help finance teams. Automation can be particularly helpful in regards to managing foreign cash flow as it can assist finance teams in calculating exchange rates and accurately tracking spending by geography or foreign subsidiaries.

Additionally, embracing finance automation will help manage your spend better, saving time on manual work, and enabling more richness of data, and more detail for each event. This is one area where a spend management platform like Mesh is especially helpful. It not only provides powerful automation tools but can also be used to bring all spending from multiple entities into one platform.

Automating key elements of your finance tech stack is also helpful in increasing visibility across your company’s finances. This will help you develop a more robust cash forecast, as previously mentioned.

Build a Robust Model

When dealing with multi-currency cash flow, it’s also important to focus on building a robust and reliable model of your data. Clear and correct data that provides a complete and accurate picture of cash flow is critical to drawing the proper conclusions for your business.

To support this, it’s important to identify your different data sources and make sure they are complete and accurate. In the event where the data is incomplete you’ll most likely face reconciliation issues.

This is another area where Mesh can help, as it’s able to deliver clean data that you can easily incorporate into your model.

Final Thoughts

Managing multiple currencies has become a core task for most finance teams and requires a special focus on accurately tracking and recording spending from multiple locations and subsidiaries. These best practices can help your team manage the challenges presented by multi-currency cash flow, and keep your team focused on your business’s challenges.

Find out more about Mesh, its support for global finance teams, and the ways it can help your business implement some of these best practices.

FAQs

The post 4 Finance Team Best Practices for Managing Multi-Currency Cash Flow appeared first on Mesh.

Mesh Global provides businesses with a unified platform for all of their global spend, while allowing them to manage each local entity with fine level controls customized for local regulations and compliance. Global businesses will now be able to hold balances and fund payments and reimbursements in local currencies, as well as use their local entities with the Mesh platform.

All of these advancements will help global finance teams significantly boost their productivity, gaining greater control and visibility into their spend. Alongside powerful automation tools, global compliance & policy enforcement, and cost and FX savings, Mesh Global will help businesses save time and money, and gain greater insight into their spending – allowing them to operate more efficiently worldwide.

The Challenge for Finance Teams

Currently, businesses with global operations and multiple entities around the world need to duplicate their operations and those of their finance team in multiple countries. They need to hold funds in local banks in local currencies to fund operations in those countries, whether its managing company spend or reimbursing employees.

This requires significant time and effort for the finance team, with repetitive tasks and time spent reporting and tracking expenses in multiple currencies. The finance team also needs to invest considerable resources maintaining local compliance, managing tax issues, and observing disparate spending policies for different entities.

Mesh helps finance teams solve these problems in a number of ways.

Unified Global Spending

Mesh brings incredible levels of control to global finance teams. Companies are able to see all of their global spending in one global dashboard, and also manage spending with full visibility and control over each global entity. This provides insights into spending and tight controls to keep expenses in check.

This is a profound change for finance teams as it brings together disparate global operations into one platform, helping finance teams gain real insight and complete picture of global operations.

Local Currencies

Now, using Mesh, your global finance team can hold balances in the currencies it needs to fund global operations and pay for and settle expenses in those currencies, helping save considerable costs.

Businesses have always been able to spend anywhere in the world using Mesh, but now finance teams have the option to hold balances in US Dollars, British Pounds, Euros, and other currencies, and issue payment cards and fund reimbursements in those currencies.

This means that finance teams can streamline operations, boost productivity, and further optimize their spend. It helps remove the volatility of currency conversions, further accelerating and simplifying the monthly close process.

Boosting Productivity for Global Finance Teams

Mesh is laser focussed on helping finance professionals become more productive, eliminating repetitive tasks through automation and helping the team focus on core, strategic tasks. Now, Mesh can help finance teams use automation to streamline managing multi-currency spend.

Mesh enables global finance teams to collect and match receipts automatically in multiple currencies. Finance managers can also create advanced workflows to enforce company policies automatically across entities.

Automatic Global Compliance

Operating in different locations with different entities can present numerous compliance challenges as each country will have its own set of regulations. Mesh allows teams to build in spending policies or create entity specific workflows that help automate compliance. This can help shave off hours of work for finance teams.

Mesh also helps companies manage VAT and local taxation issues, as finance teams can control and review spending per each entity.

Local ERP Integrations

Managing multiple global entities requires investing time and resources to set up the company’s ERP for each entity individually. With Mesh, it’s easy to tailor the platform with integrations specifically targeted for each global entity, accelerating monthly close and other tasks.

The Right Solution for Each Payment, for Each Entity

Mesh brings a payment-focused approach to spend management, allowing companies to tailor the payment for its purpose – whether that’s a SaaS platform, travel expenses, or marketing spend.

Now, those fine level customizations can be tailored for specific entities in specific geographies, helping finance teams take even more control over spending.

A Unified Solution for Global Finance Teams

Global businesses require local spending solutions to help them operate efficiently around the world. Mesh is helping finance teams boost their global productivity and providing solutions to help them with fine level controls for each of their global entities coupled with the ability to hold balances in local currencies. All of this is tied together in one unified platform helping businesses gain a full picture of their spending around the world.

To find out more about Mesh and how it can help your finance team, sign up for a demo today.

The post Unifying Worldwide Spend, Mesh Goes Global appeared first on Mesh.

One of the ways Mesh enables finance teams to increase their productivity is through finance automation. Many of the tasks finance teams are responsible for are time-consuming and labor-intensive. These include core finance tasks such as closing the monthly books and receipt reconciliation, but finance teams also need to work alongside other teams to enable them to achieve their goals.

In the case of HR teams, there is a considerable amount of support that finance professionals need to provide during the onboarding and offboarding of employees. Specifically, the time spent issuing payment cards for new employees, or canceling or removing payment permissions when employees leave, can place a real burden on them. These workloads require finance teams to perform repetitive data-entry that takes up much of their time, which could instead be invested in more strategic planning.

It’s incredibly difficult to increase productivity when so much time is wasted on repetitive tasks. So with Mesh’s finance automation tools, CFOs, and other finance professionals are able to regain that time by offloading much of the work to the platform itself.

Whether that’s receipt matching with OCR, or automatic payment approvals, or streamlining reminders to employees, Mesh provides multiple ways for finance teams to save time and be more productive.

One new way that Mesh can help automate finance work, is with HRIS integrations. Human Resource Information Systems (HRIS) are powerful platforms that help businesses manage their HR needs. These platforms help them keep track of employees, manage org structures, time off requests, and other important tasks needed to manage their team.

Mesh is able to integrate with dozens of the leading HRIS platforms, bringing in important information about your employees that can help automate important tasks.

Some of the top platforms supported by Mesh include:

• ADP
• Paylocity
• BambooHR
• UKG
• Workday
• HiBob
• Sage HR
• SAP SuccessFactors
• Rippling
• And many more

Most importantly, these integrations are able to help finance teams significantly streamline the onboarding and offboarding process of employees. Many businesses will see tens of employees leaving and joining the company every month. Keeping track of payment authorizations for that many employees manually is a time-consuming and daunting process.

With Mesh, finance admins are notified when employees either need to be added or removed from the system. It’s easy to then provide new employees with relevant payment cards for expenses such as meals, travel, gas cards, or to pay for software.

In regards to offboarding, the automation Mesh provides is even more important, especially with the proliferation of SaaS. Today, when an employee who is paying for and managing a specific SaaS service leaves the company, it can be quite challenging to maintain it afterwards. If an employee’s email is deactivated, that can cause an additional hurdle to maintaining the subscription.

With Mesh, all payments are managed through the platform. When the responsible employee leaves, it’s easy to transfer the payment card for that service to an admin or different employee, ensuring uninterrupted access to critical tools.

An additional offboarding hurdle is that payments often continue to SaaS platforms even though they are no longer needed. With Mesh, you can cancel payments instantly, and also gain visibility into SaaS subscriptions that have become redundant. The bottom line is that Mesh can help maintain, or cancel, all relevant payments with just a click.

By automating much of the manual work around spend approvals, employee offboarding, and onboarding, Mesh’s HRIS integrations can help your finance team be more productive while improving cost efficiency and visibility. To find out more about how Mesh can help you automate your finances, sign up for a demo today.

The post Boosting Finance Team Productivity with HRIS Integrations appeared first on Mesh.

For us at Mesh, we are constantly examining ways we can contribute to this important dialog while ensuring that we implement these ideals in our business. In that light, we are extremely proud of the fact that half of our senior leadership team is made up of women and that we lead with a woman CFO, COO, and CPO.

At Mesh, our platform, and the value it provides to our CFOs and finance leaders is our top priority and it all depends on the experience we deliver. The executive responsible for that experience is our Chief Product Officer, Ronny Maate.

We spoke to Ronny to understand her background, what brought her into tech, and what the wider industry can do to include more women in the tech space.

When did you become interested in technology? What first got you interested in tech?

Funnily enough, I didn’t study anything related to computers at school, I majored in mathematics, chemistry, and biology. So, I cannot say I’ve always been a “techie.” To be honest I was not very aware of or exposed to the technology industry early on.

My exposure and awareness changed when I served my compulsory military service in the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) and was assigned to computing. Over the course of 24 months, my interest in technology and my knowledge of the subject grew so much that I wanted to pursue it as a career following my service.

Let’s talk about your background. How did you end up in your career path? What obstacles did you have to overcome?

After my service in the IDF, I attended the Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology University. During my studies, I started working for a big company in Israel called Amdocs, which provides information systems for telcos. I discovered there that product was the thing I loved and what I wanted to focus on. Since my first stint at Amdocs over 20 years ago, I have worked in technology ever since.

I grew up in a girls house with strong female role models in my sister, mother, and grandmother. I was raised to believe I could do anything I put my mind to. I don’t remember ever thinking I couldn’t do such and such because I am a girl. I knew I could do anything I wanted.

While I’m used to being the only woman in the room (the majority of my class at Technion were men, and the majority of my workplaces have been male-dominated), I have always felt natural and equal in these surroundings because of my upbringing. I’ve never thought I can’t speak my mind or can’t ask for anything I want.

And for the most part, I’ve never felt like I’ve been dismissed because I am a woman. There was only one manager who made me feel less respected as a woman – like my thoughts and opinions didn’t matter as much. It made me feel small. In hindsight, I think it was my confidence and outspokenness that intimidated him. Overall though, I’ve had excellent managers, both women, and men, throughout my career, who have empowered me to feel confident and capable of doing anything.

Mesh Payments is the first company in my career where I’ve worked alongside more than one other woman executive. Gender diversity is not just at the top, either – women represent 50 percent of senior management at Mesh too.

Did you receive support from your family and friends? Do you have a role model?

Very early on in my career as a young manager, I had a role model who helped me discover my managerial style. He reinforced some great teachings – you need to know your worth, be confident within yourself, always be professional, and know who you are.

One of the best tips he ever gave me was to empower your team and not be intimidated by recruiting employees who have skills you don’t have. Praise in public, criticize in private. You don’t need to criticize or call people out in public to state your control. You earn respect if you’re professional, take on the responsibility yourself and then teach behind closed doors. You must be conscious of the people that report to you and considerate of them.

My greatest role models are my mother and grandmother. They are both very powerful women. My mother studied economics back when it was designed purely for men and wasn’t as socially acceptable for women to pursue. My grandmother’s family died in the Holocaust, and she came to Israel at the very young age of 16 years old. Self-made women, neither my mother nor grandmother were afraid to do anything on their own.

Hilary Clinton is another powerful woman I consider a role model. She’s always pushed the dial and did things that were not common for women. She’s powerful and inspiring and has always gone against what was expected of her as a woman. Her confidence has always served as a reminder to not let anyone tell you what you can and can’t do.

Did anyone ever try to stop you from learning and advancing in your professional life?

There have been moments when I’ve been frustrated and clashed with all types of managers, but overall this was more to do with a personality or situational clash than me being a woman. I’m proudly confident, and headstrong, and I always speak up, and this has got me to where I am today. It’s allowed me to accomplish professional goals and be promoted. It’s not about being a woman, it’s about being a professional. I’ve always relied on the fact that I fully understand the products I manage inside out so it’s hard to stop me. I’ve gained recognition as a result. Additionally, what has got me this far in my career is my ability to build teams, manage conflicts and see the bigger picture. To act as a bridge between people and opinions – soft skills have been essential for my management style.

Could you tell us more about your role at Mesh? What does your typical workday look like?

I am the Chief Product Officer. I knew Oded Zehavi, our co-founder and CEO, from a previous company we worked at together, Payoneer.

I’ve been with the company now for four years and have built the product team up from scratch. When I joined, Mesh had no product or users, it has no doubt been the greatest adventure and learning experience of my career.

To join an early-stage startup that has scaled to be a really successful company is a privileged opportunity. It was a daunting choice at first of course – choosing to join an early-stage startup over a top-tier established company, but I respected Oded and I believed in his vision.

At Mesh, I’ve been given the space to operate and be very independent. COVID threw up some unexpected challenges but we worked as a team, pivoted the product, tested the product, and came out the other end. It was very hands-on, it was a wild adventure, but it was the best way to learn…and fast! My journey here has been so special, building and designing the product, building a team around the product – the knowledge that grows with this experience is invaluable. My growth and success to date couldn’t be more fulfilling.

Three years ago, I’d never have believed we would be where we are today. The team is exceptional, and we are growing so fast, it’s exciting. Everyone feels empowered to speak their mind on the product and we (the product team) welcome the feedback and criticism. We’ve in fact set up processes to enable people to criticize the product to ensure we are building the best. This openness and transparent communication across teams is encouraged and reinforced from the top down, it leaves no room for ego and makes everyone approachable, no matter where they sit in the company. This makes Mesh special, it makes Mesh thoughtful.

What are you most proud of in your career?

In a previous company, I independently led a very long process of introducing a new product into the market where there were very complex regulatory requirements, a lot of partners involved, and managing different internal teams and timezones. I traveled a lot, working with lobbyists and numerous stakeholders. All while doing my MBA. We ended up being the first company to get this license – receiving government approval after a very drawn out and complicated process. It was a hugely proud moment.

The other proud moment was making the decision to join Mesh Payments. It was quite brave to join an early-stage startup instead of an established, profitable company. I took the risk to essentially join a business where I’d be helping to build it from the ground up. I also had a very young baby at home at this time too, so it wasn’t the safe and secure choice. But I jumped at the chance to do something new, I believed in our co-founders Oded, Eran, and their vision, and knew we could do it! It’s been interesting and challenging, building a product and teams from scratch, managing tens of employees and empowering those employees. What a ride!

Why aren’t there more women in tech? What’s your take on that? Could you name a few challenges (or obstacles) women in tech face?

It’s a matter of culture. While I grew up thinking I could do anything, generally speaking, girls are still raised in a reality where they are less empowered to pursue tech-related endeavors. Girls are still largely focused on non-technological things (even in the tech industry there are more women in HR, project management, and marketing positions).

How would our world be different if more women worked in STEM? What would be the (social, economic, and cultural) impact?

Competition is a good thing. It forces us to make improvements and achieve more. If more women worked in STEM there’d be more partnerships, there’d be more openness and opinions, and it wouldn’t be about men and women competing, it’d be about making the industry different and better.

As long as tech keeps maturing (I think about how far the industry has come compared to when I started out just over 20 years ago), more women will be involved, there’ll be a better proportion of things and the industry as a whole will benefit. The industry will think about processes in a much deeper and smarter way, we’ll evaluate risks better, and we’ll grow and evolve.

The discussion about diversity is gaining momentum. How long will it take to see results from the current discussion?

In all my years of experience, I have never worked with a woman CEO. It’s hard to put a timeline on it but I think it will take at a minimum another 20 years to see results. Israel is more equal than other places, but we are still very far away from achieving this. It’s hard to quantify it, but we won’t see a big change very fast. It also relates to the fact that many women put their career on hold while they give birth and build families.

What advice (and tips) would you give to women who want a tech career? What should they know about this industry?

Finding the right partner in life who will allow you to wholly pursue your career aspirations. At the end of the day, if you want to pursue being a manager and having a meaningful role, it has stakes. You can’t speak to any successful woman who can say it didn’t impact their personal life or come with sacrifices. It’s not always easy, and you need someone to give you the opportunity and space to go for it.

The post Celebrating International Women’s Day: A Q&A with Mesh CPO, Ronny Maate appeared first on Mesh.

Alongside their more strategic role, finance teams are also required to perform tasks that frequently require repetitive or manual work, such as receipt collection and matching, employee reimbursement, and closing the books at the end of the month.

Fortunately, new tools and platforms have managed to help finance not only more successfully manage these tasks, but also to automate them. Automation delivers multiple advantages to finance teams, chief among them significant time savings. Beyond that, automation helps finance managers boost productivity, improve the accuracy of their financial reports, and gain an overall tighter grasp on the company’s financial activity.

This guide will help you understand finance automation and what it means for your business:

What is finance automation?

At its core, finance automation is about removing the workload from the finance team and handing it off to a software platform. Until now, finance teams have relied on more traditional accounting software or often on spreadsheets and other tools to help them manage accounting and other tasks. However, these digital tools have required intensive manual effort, repetition, and date entry.

This is a deeply inefficient way to work, and leads to inaccuracies in financial tracking and reporting, and loss of productivity as it bogs down the finance teams bogged in more menial tasks.

Finance managers dread having to chase after employees for receipts and other information, or spending time reviewing credit card statements, or matching data to printed invoices. The problem is that much of the information the finance team needs is located in disparate systems, in different formats, without any unifying structure.

New platforms, including modern ERPs, spend management platforms, and expense or travel reimbursement platforms, offer finance teams multiple ways to automate many of the workflows that have until now required manual effort. They do so, by bringing all the information finance teams need into online platforms as well as providing tight control over important areas such as spending, T&E, or accounts payable.

For example, with spend management, all of the company’s expenses can be handled by a single platform. All spending data exists online, and can be easily synced with other systems, making it far more accurate and significantly reducing time spent reconciling expenses at the end of the month.

Below, we’ll provide a deeper exploration of finance automation through detailed examples.

Finance Automation Examples

Receipt collection matching

Collecting receipts from employees is challenging enough, but it becomes even more cumbersome when each receipt needs to be matched to the correct transaction. However, with automation tools, these processes can be automated. Receipts can be automatically collected via email or other platforms, and then scanned with OCR (optical character recognition) for relevant details such as the amount and date. This information is then automatically matched to the corresponding transaction in the platform.

AP Automation

Managing invoices and ensuring that they are paid in a timely fashion can place significant demands on finance teams. However, automation means that invoices can be processed by the platform and payments can be integrated into existing platforms ensuring a more streamlined solution.

ERP Integration

One of the most important platforms for any finance team is its ERP, used to manage all of its finances. Automation platforms will integrate with the company’s ERP and can automatically sync payment for other information they collect.

Other App Integrations

In addition to your company’s ERP, new solutions can integrate with other apps and services your company uses and automate other workflows. For instance, integration with Human Resource Information Systems (HRIS) can allow your company to automatically issue payment cards or assign budgets to new employees or members of specific teams.

Policy Compliance

It’s important for finance teams to make sure that company spending is inline with the policies they set. Automation allows your team to integrate policies directly into the payment methods themselves, ensuring compliance.

Automatic Workflows

There are some actions that your finance team always takes in response to certain criteria. For example, if a team or department requests a budget above a certain amount, it might require the direct approval of the CEO, CFO, or other manager. Automation platforms can streamline and automate that process, surfacing requests to the right people.

Payment approvals

Employees need to spend money on tools and services to be productive. When they request a budget for a specific service, the time it takes for that to be approved can prevent them from accomplishing their goals. Automating this process and allowing employees to make purchases within pre-set limits with streamline things for everyone.

Communication with employees

Currently, communication between finance teams and employees might require some kind of form or less formal communication via email or other platforms. Finance automation can streamline this and allow for notifications or reminders to be automatically issued when employees need to take action such as approving a payment or providing a receipt.

Benefits of Finance Automation

As previously stated, the principal benefit of finance automation is the time savings it can provide your team. Of course, time saved is no laughing matter – especially considering that time equals money. However, automation can deliver additional benefits alongside time savings.

Cost savings

Automation can also help your business cut down on costs by identifying wasteful or redundant spending. In addition, finance automation platforms can also identify more affordable alternative solutions or providers and suggest them to relevant managers.

Accuracy of financial statements

This is one of the most critical requirements for finance teams, ensuring that the company’s books are accurate and up-to-date. Automation is a boon in this regard, as it can automatically provide the necessary information and match it to transactions or other activities.

Real-time overview

All too often, finance teams are acting on information that takes time to compile and may already be out of date by the time they can act on it. Automation allows for finance managers to take steps based on a real-time picture of the company’s financials.

Visibility

When you move more and more of your finances into automated and online platforms, it sheds new light on those finances and increases your team’s visibility into your expenses. You can see where your company is spending significant resources, if there are redundant or unnecessary expenses, and also where there are opportunities for growth.

Strategic focus

Anytime you free up your team from time consuming tasks, it allows them to turn their focus to more strategic tasks and big picture thinking. Focusing on the details of today is important, but in turbulent economic times making preparations for the future is more important than ever.

Wider Benefits to the Company

Beyond the finance team, bringing automation into your finance workflows will accrue benefits across your business.

Productivity

In tough times, every company needs to find ways to do more with less – to be more productive with the resources at hand. Automation can unlock productivity gains across the company with both time and resources being re-focused on core tasks and responsibilities rather than the minutiae of finance tasks.

Improved insights

As mentioned above, finance automation can significantly improve visibility in your company’s financial performance. This visibility can help every part of your company, every department, gain a clearer understanding of their performance, how close they are to meeting KPIs, and where they can be more efficient.

Faster approvals

Every employee wants to have their spending requests approved as quickly as possible.
Waiting on approval for an important tool or service can prevent team members from accomplishing their tasks. Automating the process will allow everyone to achieve more.

Less friction for employees

Improving the everyday experience for employees is an important goal. Automation can help remove points of friction between the finance team and employees and allow everyone to focus on their specific roles.

Steps to Setting Up Finance Automation

So you’re ready to get started automating your finances. What are your first steps.

Research

Choosing one or more new platforms to automate your finances requires a deep understanding of what the different capabilities of those platforms are. Dedicate an employee or a team to researching the different solutions available to see which is best suited for your needs.

Analyze your company’s pain points

Look at the specific pain points your business is facing and looking for solutions that are tailored to those problems. Work with the entirety of your finance team to evaluate current workflows and develop an understanding of how they will be impacted by new solutions.

Test the software

If possible, test the new software on a trial basis to see how it integrates with your other tools and workflows. Once you’ve selected a solution, continue to evaluate it as you implement it and look for areas that require special attention.

Training

Once you have selected the right solutions, make sure you also develop a process to train the employees of your organization how to take advantage of them. Work across departments and include managers in the process to make sure every employee that can interact with a new system is able to do so.

Evaluate your current tools

Then take a close look at the current platforms you are using. Which ones can be replaced, and which can be supplemented with other solutions. Understanding how new solutions will integrate with your existing tech stack is critical.

Work with other teams

The next step is working with the wider organization – managers and team leaders from all the different departments of your business. It’s likely that any change the finance team makes can have significant impacts on processes that affect those teams as well. So it’s important to gain feedback from them and secure their buy-in to implementing any change.

What Challenges to Expect

While it offers numerous benefits, implementing any serious change to your finance workflow can present serious challenges. The first amongst these is the difficulties that come with adopting any new set of tools or technologies. Every company has a certain amount of legacy technology, and it can be daunting to replace those platforms.

Another critical question is what is the immediate cost of making any change. While finance automation can lower costs in the long run, adding new systems can incur immediate expenses, either as a result of acquiring those platforms or because of lost time needed to onboard them. This shouldn’t deter you from adopting new technologies, but certainly needs to be a factor.

There will also be new security risks and requirements involved as financial information is moved into new, online platforms. So make sure to review those risks as well any potential regulatory hurdles involved.

Key Points to Remember

Finance automation can deliver significant benefits to your company. It can not only help you save time and money, but also reduce the burden of constant manual tasks, so your finance team can focus on big-picture strategic work.

Automation is also a boon to the accuracy of your financial reporting, ensuring you have a clear picture of your company’s financial health. Productivity gains achieved through automation can help your company navigate challenging economic times and drive new growth.

Various solutions exist that can help you tackle different pieces of the finance puzzle. Work to understand the challenges your company faces, as well as what challenges you will encounter as you integrate new solutions.

If you’d like to find out more about how Mesh can help you automate your finances, sign up for a demo today.

FAQs

The post Guide to Finance Automation appeared first on Mesh.

This is especially true for finance professionals and CFOS. Whether it’s new ideas, new regulations, or simply new sources of inspiration, CFOs need to stay up-to-date with changes in their industry, and also with wider trends.

Beyond that, CFOs can’t merely be focused on their own wheelhouse as financial professionals, but must also develop a wider understanding of the business landscape. CFO is a leadership position that is increasingly strategic and requires adaptation to changing circumstances, so it’s important for any CFO to have a broad base of knowledge.

To that end, we created this list of 20 books that every CFO can learn from. The books are divided into four categories:

Finance

These are books designed with CFOs in-mind to provide them with strategies, insights, and guidance to be successful.

The Successful CFO – Tony Tripodo

With deep insights based on 40 years of experience, Tripido shares the lessons he learned that helped him become successful. The book is focused on helping CFOs meet the needs of an increasingly demanding role that has taken on greater importance in recent years.

The Successful CFO

The Strategic CFO: Creating Value in a Dynamic Market Environment – Ulrich Hommel

With so many changes happening so quickly in the finance space and in the wider business realm, the role of the CFO has had to adapt just as quickly. This book looks at the impact of technology, new products, and changing markets and tries to help CFOs understand the dynamic landscape in which they need to operate.

The Strategic CFO

The Lean CFO: Architect of the Lean Management System – Nicholas S. Katko

Lean management has become an increasingly popular management style and this book helps CFOs understand how that approach can be integrated into their work. It also examines specific steps and changes to accounting practices that CFOs can take to help them enact the lean management philosophy into their organization.

The Lean CFO

The New CFO Financial Leadership Manual – Steven M. Bragg

With the CFO role being an executive position, there is a natural intersection of financial responsibility and the demands of leadership. This work aims to be a comprehensive guide for CFOs to navigate those two responsibilities while helping them understand the way their role must interact with other important players on their finance team.

CFO Financial Leadership Manual

Deep Finance: Corporate Finance in the Information Age – Glenn Hopper

Like all things, technology is having profound impacts on financial professionals and the way they work. New tools and platforms are dramatically changing the way CFOs approach regular tasks that were, until recently, labor intensive. Deep Finance looks specifically at the way technology is changing the role of the CFO and finance professionals more generally.

Deep Finance

Leadership

The CFO is a leadership role. They not only have to lead a team, but serve an important role leading the company in its financial management. These recommendations will help CFOs understand what it means to be a leader.

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People – Stephen R. Covey

This classic work focuses first and foremost on helping individuals increase their own personal productivity and effectiveness. The qualities are invaluable to those in leadership roles and can help CFOs understand how to bring out these same qualities in their employees. Simple and focused, it has become well known in the professional world.

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

Leadershift: The 11 Essential Changes Every Leader Must Embrace – John C. Maxwell

Leadership isn’t a question of natural ability. It’s a skill that must be honed and developed over time and influenced by experience. Maxwell explores the ways change impacts leadership, and the techniques leaders can use to change themselves as trends shift. Staying nimble and adapting is critical.

Leadershift

Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action – Simon Sinek

Going to work can’t just be a simple question of what. Professionals today demand deeper meaning in their professional lives beyond the mundane everyday tasks that come with any role. Sinek examines the way meaning, and asking the question of “why” can help leaders inspire their employees to pursue more meaningful goals and ultimately contribute to greater success.

Start with Why

Wooden on Leadership: How to Create a Winning Organization – John Wooden

There is perhaps no one that knew more about winning than famous UCLA coach, John Wooden. In this work, he shares his insights into leadership, and the lessons he learned from inspiring his players to reach the highest levels of success.

Wooden on Leadership

Disrupt-It-Yourself: Eight Ways to Hack a Better Business—Before the Competition Does – Simone Dhan Ahuja

“There’s always a bigger fish.” In the competitive landscape of modern business, there is always a chance that a competitor will come along and disrupt your business. One way to prevent that, is to disrupt yourself. Ahuja shares her experiences and lessons that can help leaders develop the tools to implement rapid and fundamental changes. It may be these changes that keep your business successful and ahead of competitors.

Disrupt-It-Yourself

Innovation

Change isn’t just something that happens in the business world – it’s absolutely necessary. Here are books that can help you understand how to leverage change and innovation to your advantage.

The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail – Clayton M. Christensen

Inherent to any successful company, is the tension between the existing factors that have driven success, and those that will carry the business forward in the future. Part of a series of books that have become a go-to source on innovation and its impacts, Christensen explores how companies often miss waves of innovation, and how you can prevent that at your own company.

The Innovator’s Dilemma

Innovation and Entrepreneurship – Peter F. Drucker

Why they can be thought of as two separate disciplines, Drucker explores the intricate links between innovation and entrepreneurship. In the modern economy, they are impossible to separate and it demands a deep understanding of both from professionals looking to succeed. Even established businesses need to understand these processes and how they can be impacted, or disrupted by them.

Innovation and Entrepreneurship

How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom – Matt Ridley

What kind of political and cultural environment inspires innovation? In parts of the world where freedom is well established, innovation is also able to flourish. So argues Ridley in this book, that also explores specific historical examples of innovation, the unique circumstances that enabled them, and what lessons can be learned from those experiences.

How Innovation Works

The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses – Eric Ries

Another example in the category of lean management, this work focuses on startups and how running lean can help them succeed. And while not every business faces the unique challenges of a startup, there are nevertheless powerful lessons to be learned about innovation from those that focus on it the most.

The Lean Startup

Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products – Nir Eyal

One of the most important tasks for any innovator is building a product that sticks, that keeps the user interacting with it. CFOs have much they can learn from this work by Nir Eyal, and the ways that building products, or processes, that people are drawn to is a recipe for success.

Hooked

Inspiration

While these works aren’t necessarily directly related to the day to day of being a CFO, they still can help anyone learn a bit more about what it means to be human. And after all, CFOs and their teams are just people who want to succeed.

The Alchemist – Paulo Coelho

An epic adventure across the world looking for treasure – what could be more inspiring than that? Well, the Alchemist pulls an interesting trick, helping the reader learn valuable lessons about the self, and that sometimes the treasure we’re looking for is hidden right in front of us.

The Alchemist

Zen Shorts (A Stillwater and Friends Book)

What can you learn from a giant panda? In this book for children, which can be enjoyed by adults as well, it turns out quite a bit. Stillwater, the panda in question, shares zen-inspired pearls of wisdom and life lessons that can help expand anyone’s horizons – whether they’re five or 50.

Zen Shorts

Can’t Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds – David Goggins

This is Goggins personal story of how he climbed out of poverty and a difficult childhood to ascend the ranks of the US Armed Forces where he served in several elite units. His lessons on resilience, perseverance, and how to tap into all of your capabilities can provide inspiration for anyone.

Can’t Hurt Me

Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less – Greg McKeown

In our multitasking obsessed world, it can be all too easy to try focus on a thousand things at once. But, perhaps the answer is instead to narrow our focus on the essentials. That’s the claim of this work that can provide you with new perspective on what is most important in life.

Essentialism

Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It – Chris Voss

What can you learn from an FBI hostage negotiator? Turns out quite a lot. Voss draws on his experience dealing with some life-threatening situations to help you understand how you can handle, less stressful, negotiations in your own life whether they’re personal or professional.

Never Split the Difference

Whether you find helpful information or inspiration in one of these books or, in a favorite book of your own, CFOs need to stay focused on finding new ways to help their businesses succeed. Continued education and knowledge building are key, especially in these challenging economic times.

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Corporate cards started out simply enough. Companies needed to pay for goods and services, and the standard credit card seemed like it could be a good fit for businesses as well. For a while, that was a sufficient solution. But in today’s business world, the corporate card isn’t keeping up with the pace of change, the demands of businesses, or with new models of remote and distributed work forces.

Corporate cards limit finance teams with several drawbacks, including low levels of control, limited visibility into spending, and critically, insufficient levels of security. They often introduce extra work reconciling payments at the end of the month and can lead to uncontrolled spending as team members pay with the card without sufficient supervision.

Understanding these challenges is what led Mesh Payments to create Plug & Pay — a next-generation physical corporate card that provides businesses with all of the benefits of spend management platforms. What that translates to is a corporate card that provides the highest level of security and total control for finance teams.

So, how does it work?

A Physical Card or a Virtual Card? Why Not Both?

Many businesses today looking for payment solutions are weighing the strengths of physical corporate cards or spend management platforms with virtual cards. Plug & Pay is both. A numberless physical card that allows you to plug in any of your virtual cards from Mesh’s spend management platform.

Linking your physical Plug & Pay card to any of our virtual cards takes just a few seconds in the app, and you can switch from one virtual card to another in seconds. This means that you can easily change limits, expiration dates, or other controls whenever you like.

The Highest Possible Security for a Physical Card

How does Plug & Pay enable such high security? First, it’s a numberless card, so there’s no way for someone acting maliciously to copy the number from the card. Second, if somehow the virtual number is compromised, you can simply swap to a new virtual card in seconds and cancel the other. Mesh also provides instant notifications about suspicious transactions and provides 24/7 monitoring to prevent fraud.

Even if you lose the physical card, you don’t necessarily need to cancel the virtual card associated with it. You can simply “unplug” the virtual card from Plug & Pay. Why is this important?

If you used that virtual card number for a subscription or other recurring payment, you might not want to cancel it. Plug & Pay enables more security, with even more convenience.

The Convenience of a Physical Card; the Controls of a Virtual Card

Why is it still important to have a physical card in a world where virtual wallets and mobile payments are so common? Simply because there are still many businesses all around the world that aren’t set up to receive payments from mobile wallets. Having a physical card ensures that you can make payments no matter what.

However, that shouldn’t mean sacrificing the high level of control that virtual cards and spend management platforms like Mesh can provide.

With Plug & Pay finance teams remain in control at all times. They can change limits on the fly, cancel or suspend cards, or make sure that any new virtual cards linked to Plug & Pay are automatically in line with company expense policies.

Spend management platforms are increasingly becoming must have solutions for finance teams precisely because of this high level of control, and with Plug & Pay, companies no longer need to sacrifice on these controls when they make payments with a physical card.

Great Visibility into Purchases Made in the Real-World

Virtual cards and spend management platforms provide a high level of visibility into spending, helping businesses understand what their expenses are. This is critical for businesses that are looking to control or cut back on costs.

However, visibility can break down when purchases are made in physical stores rather than online, leaving many categories of expenses opaque and difficult to measure. Plug & Pay can help illuminate those expenses made with physical cards since they link directly with the virtual cards Mesh provides. This ensures visibility across corporate spending, no matter where or how it’s made.

The Best of Both Worlds for Finance Teams

Plug & Pay slots in exactly where finance teams are looking to streamline and cut costs. It helps them stay in control of payments, no matter where or how they are made, and it does so while providing the highest level of security.

It provides finance teams with a no-compromise solution for payments just as the economic climate is placing all kinds of demands and limitations on corporate spending. To find out more about how Plug & Pay can help you take control of spending, sign up for a demo of Mesh today.

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